The galactic environments of diverse massive stellar explosions

Massive stars explodie in a wide diversity of empirical signatures as astrophysical transients.

From classicial core-collapse supernovae, wherein the star explodes due to the collapse of a central iron core, to rare, but optically-luminous, transients for which progenitors are much less certain.

Alongside study of the explosion signatures directly, such as characterising the luminosity and spectroscopic evolution of the transient, the use of the environment in which the star exploded can also be used ot gather clues on its nature.

Akin to deciphering the model of a car's wreck by knowing if it was turning the corner in Monaco or Middlesborough, we can use the galactic environments of transients to learn about their progenitor stars, their explosion mechanisms, and their powering sources. All of these have significant uncertainty and are gaps in our knowledge of stellar evolution.

This project will use data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope, among others, to perform detailed characterisation of a number of different classes of transients, all linked to the deaths of massive stars.

The project will work closely on detailed data analysis and statistics, whilst collaborating on stellar population synthesis results to push this work into state-of-the-art.

Three sub-projects already have data acquired - the study of Superluminous supernovae, the study of broad stripped-envelope supernovae, and the meshing of optical and ultra-violet data for the characterisation for the delay-time distribution of core-collapse supernovae.